Options:

1. Install Windows 98SE and play DOS games in a command line window.

2. Try this: http://www.dosgames.com/forum/about3877.html

3. Get another soundcard.

4. Use DosBox.

Hi, thanks for the reply. So, as the four options:

3. Get another soundcard.

This is a relativly new laptop - I don't think I'd have a lot of luck finding an old laptop PCI SB card for it. Even if I did, I'd really rather not go down the route, since I'm primarily using it as a WinXP machine for programming.

4. Use DosBox.

DosBox is great, but there are a few games I want to play that it doesn't quite get right. I really want to see if I can get DOS running naturally on this first.

1. Install Windows 98SE and play DOS games in a command line window.

I've tried that, but for some reason I'm having the same problem - I've got sound in Windows, but not when I try to play Dos games.

2. Try this: http://www.dosgames.com/forum/about3877.html

I actually got pretty far with this, but eventually hit a dead end with a BIOS error that I couldn't resolve. So I guess that's not going to work either.

It looks like I'm going to have to give up on this idea, which is a real pity...

ChaoticHarmony wrote:

Is there maybe a tool out there to get DOS to think I've got a soundblaster or something?

No, but VIA has some recent motherboards with an on-board sound chip that with VIA's DOS-drivers, for VIA's motherboards, will make that on-board sound chip work with games that want a SoundBlaster card.

ChaoticHarmony wrote:

4. Use DosBox.

DosBox is great, but there are a few games I want to play that it doesn't quite get right. I really want to see if I can get DOS running naturally on this first.

As in?? Which games?

1. Install Windows 98SE and play DOS games in a command line window.

I've tried that, but for some reason I'm having the same problem - I've got sound in Windows, but not when I try to play Dos games.

I have the same thing, onboard Intel sound and Windows 98SE. From what I've read, 98 emulates DOS sound through the use of SBEMUL.SYS, which is in;

c:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\DRIVERS\SBEMUL.SYS

Also note that you will have to run the setup program for whatever game you want to play and configure the sound manually.

For the game Blood, I used the following settings;

Card Type: Soundblater Pro 2.0
Address: 0x220
Interupt: 5
8-bit DMA: 1
16-bit DMA 5

Other Soundblaster types seem to work as well, but they don't sound as good. For example, not all of them had separate left/right audio.

Music is set to General MIDI. I had to change the Windows MIDI settings in the Multimedia properties from SoundMAX to MS Wavetable Synth before it would play the music though.

Finally, if you have more than one CD/DVD drive, and the game plays CD audio, make sure that you have the CD in the drive that is set as the default drive for playing music. You can change this in the Multimedia properties in the control panel.

I've had problems getting "Colonization" to work, "War Diary", and "I have no mouth and I must scream" too. Anyway, this isn't an attack on DosBox or anything, I've used it a lot - I just think it would be a lot cooler to have a proper dos partition working on my PC.

Thanks, Rekrul, I'll look into that!

Well, that seems to work - I've now got sound for DOS games in Win98. Thanks again!